While there have been popular TV shows featuring Jewish families or characters in recent years, gone are the Seinfeld days of benign Jewish cultural references mixed in with day-to-day banality wrapped into a 30-minute sitcom. For example, episode 69 in the fifth season of Seinfeld , “The Bris ,” gave mainstream English-speaking audiences a satirical taste of the mitzvah of circumcision in 1993 replete with snarky witticism and a classic Seinfeld charm. Seinfeld stood out in a TV landscape where, for decades, depictions of Jewish characters in entertainment have been saturated with shtick , seldom moving further than a reliance on caricature and easily recognizable motifs .
My research and teaching focuses on Jewish storytelling in its many complex forms. As antisemitic attitudes have begun to proliferate in past months, I have started to worry that perhaps contemporary media is not selecting diverse enough portrayals to demonstrate how colourful Jewishness can be. The reinforcement of stereotypes and ethnic generalizations will invariably result in what noted postcolonial theorist Edward Said would have considered “exoticization .
” This is not to say that depictions of Jewish characters, themes and topics have only been stereotypes up to this point, but that many audiences previously relied on highly superficial information for understanding Jewishness. With the revolutionary introduction of streaming media , the world of diversified storytelling has become a reality.
